A drive for noncar options in graying nation

Then again with G DUHbya and the oil boys in charge this may be just a dream.

Neal Peirce / Syndicated columnist

You can see it coming: efforts across the 50 states to test aging drivers to reduce horrors such as 86-year-old Russell Weller apparently confusing his brake and accelerator and plowing through a farmer's market in Santa Monica, Calif., killing 10 people and injuring dozens of others.

Nine days later, Louis Nirenstein, 79, a polio victim who uses a wheelchair when not driving, lost control of his station wagon and careened into another outdoor market, this one in Flagler Beach, Fla. Despite injuries, no deaths were reported.

What's sure is that we can expect more incidents. Fatalities among drivers aged 70 or older jumped 27 percent from 1991 to 2001.

Elders drive an average of 37 minutes a day, 28 percent more than a decade ago, according to the Washington-based Road Information Program.

What's more, as baby boomers age, a virtual tsunami of older drivers is headed for our roads. By 2030, more than one in five Americans will be 65 or older and one in 11 of those individuals will be 85 or older. Waning physical alertness and response is virtually inevitable at advanced ages.

So what to do? Brad Kahn, co-director of the Active Living Network, sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, poses the critical question: "If we, as a nation, are going to consider taking licenses away from unfit elderly drivers, what are we offering as an alternative to the car?"

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http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2001542039_peirce18.html

of vehicle. I'm not proud. If it is big enough to carry groceries, that's fine with me.

For starters, our RTA/Metro Bus system coverage should be expanded, and should offer free service to anyone over 65. I think one could also make the argument that our railway service needs a total overhaul. Amtrak just isn't cutting the mustard. We need to build a new system that makes Europe jealous.

Of course, before you do any of that, you'll need to bust that pesky Texas OIL cartel...

I agree with you totally about the disgraceful state of the national rail system, and would like to add a thought or two of interest. First California actually funds three Amtrak routes instate, and the ridership on this rose by a third last year. Second, the so-called high-speed Amtrak lines are actually abuot the speed of the fast trains in <U>Korea</U> that I rode in, let' see, 1993 or '94 when I was there visiting relatives. Since then, Korea has dumped those trains as outdated and replaced them with really fast trains....so we need to make Korea jealous first before we can even think about making Europe jealous.

Finally, the vast majority of miles and therefore of crashes are the short errand runs - and to fix that problem we need something other than long-haul trains, probably something other than local buses, even, since those are often centered around eomployment considerations rather than errand-running. Possibilities are bikes/trikes, super golf-carts, or neighborhood designed so that homes and shops are close together.

....we aren't going to redesign neighborhoods in the time left before gazillions of boomers need a safer way to get around.

What we need to create is more "dial-a-ride" systems with smaller vehicles than the buses they now use. Or community shuttles that make grocery-pharmacy runs.

Most seniors don't need the extended services a city bus system provides. They just need to get to the grocery, the senior center, the doctor, the library. And they can't be standing at a bus stop in the winter with bags of groceries.

And I agree about train services. Expand! Expand! And clean up the interstate buses.

I can go five minutes from home, step onto an Amtrak train, and get off 3,000 miles away in NYC. How cool is that?

about how they will meet their needs if and when they become unable to drive.

That means retiring to a place with good public transit or demanding that their community institute it.

The entire country would benefit from better public transit.

A lot of the financial stress that families feel, I'm convinced, is the expense of maintaining a fleet of cars. If public transit allowed a family to get buy on even one less car, they would immediately see a tax-free rise in disposable income of several thousand dollars.

in some areas - for example, I have active healthy old relatives living in one of the Sun Cities, outside Phoenix, and it is very well planned indeed. Given money, those sorts of places can be put up very quickly. I am fortunate enough to live in an area with good public transit (you're not gonna believe this), Los Angeles. Yes, it really is quite decent, especially compared to my previous places of residence, Omaha and Minneapolis/St Paul. On the dial-a-ride thing, though - it sounds a really good idea and is if it works right, but I have a friend or two who are wheel chair riders, and they say the wait for the ride, calling for the pick-up, and so on add a lot of time to a simple trip.

In my county elderly drivers can call up for paratransit door-to-door service. They call it a "Godsend"! I call it true compassion! (Not the Bush* kind.)

taken as an intermediate step is to designate certain principal lines as "frequent service" lines, buses running a minimum of every 15 minutes, seven days a week, eighteen hours a day.

I lived in a neighborhood that happened to be served by two such lines. It was great, and a lot of elderly people used them, yes, to go shopping. The lines had "kneeling" buses, buses with no-step entrances and wheelchair lifts whose chassis could be lowered to about six inches off the ground to let older people on.

On the matter of inter-city rail, we'll soon be embarrassed by China. I haven't checked in lately, but China is considering a Japanese proposal to build a bullet train from Shanghai to Beijing. Korea and Taiwan are already modernizing their rail systems, and Singapore and Hong Kong, which are too small for inter-city rail, are modernizing their public transit.

I live between Philadelphia and Allentown/Bethlehem, and there's no way to get to either of those cities by public transportation.

The best you can do is a private bus company which maintains about 4 commuter runs to New York City a day. For a ridiculously high fare, you can catch a 20-minute ride either up to Bethlehem (but not Allentown) or down close enough to Philly to get a train to Center City.

My own town still has a few freight trains coming through, but there's been no passenger service for many years and apparently never will be, because it would be too expensive to put in the overhead electric lines.

There are times I look at pictures of the trolley service of a hundred years ago, which connected to every little town in the area, and just drool.

Of course, for that to work, we'd need two mail (and people) delivery runs a day: one in the morning, another in the afternoon.

So, we'd have better rural transportation AND better mail service! I think I'll stop now, before Pat Buchanan or somebody calls me a Communist...